Originally published on “Writers-on-Line,” a web site, in July and
August 1998, based on transcripts of a phone interview.

Did the fact that April was National Poetry Month escape you? If you
knew and paid attention, you might have received a number of conflicting
messages from the media, none of which painted a clear or realistic impression
of what poetry is and how it functions in current culture. Either there's
not a lot out there you'd want to read because it's all of a type, or
there's a lot out there you'd like to read but can't understand, or there's
a sudden resurgence of both poetry texts and public poetry readings.

All are barely more than half-truths. Charles Bernstein, editor of Close
Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, is quick to dispel the many
fairy tales the public is told about the definitions and functions of
poetry. Active in multiple poetry performance arenas, with twenty books
of poetry to his credit, Bernstein is David Gray Professor of Poetry and
Letters in the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics Program. He is one of the originators,
and Executive Editor, of The Electronic Poetry Center, as well as host
and co-producer of the LINEbreak Poetry Radio series, available in RealAudio.

Close Listening is the first critical volume exclusively devoted
to exploring the practice of poetry as performance art. In forms that
make them creative works themselves, seventeen essays by poets and poet-scholars
address the acoustic and visual aspects that make performance poetry significant.
They effectively enrich the ways performance poets and their audiences
can "attune" to the sounded and visualized word.

To venture into Close Listenings is to quickly revise such
questions as, "If you want to read in public, what kind of skills
and material make the process fulfilling?” From the book’s perspective,
this is the wrong question. It would be better to ask, “What makes a good
audience in order to get the most out of literary performance, and how
can performers and listeners better attend to the work?” The burden
shifts to the listener, and the definition of “poem” is allowed to drop
its expected association with text.

Close Listening is oddly revolutionary; it's tempting to ask
why such a collection hasn't been published before. In an interview, Bernstein
offered clear opinions about media perceptions of poetry, as well as about
the significance of poetry readings and the concept of "good"
and "bad" craft. He also had advice for poet-performers.

DANA LUTHER: Why do mainstream media neglect poetry? For instance,
why wasn't there much about National Poetry Month?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: The whole issue of having a National Poetry Month
is itself an indication of a problem. A lot of the promotions around national
poetry month tend to be feature and “soft” stories, human interest stories
which I think have little to do with the activity of writing and reading
poetry for those most involved with it. These promotions don’t really
promote an active and sustained engagement with poetry.

What could change that?

Ultimately, poetry at its most vital can’t rely upon national media attention
or wait for a response that is simply not likely to happen, given that
poetry's not a commercial proposition. The alternative is what’s been
going on for some time, which is the organization of poetry readings by
poets and editors, publication of the work by small and independent presses
and magazines, resourceful distribution systems like Small Press Distribution,
a network of committed independent book sellers, and the exchange of information
between and among poets and readers in self-sustaining communities.

How can technology boost the exchange?

Right now the internet provides a very important tool for distribution,
not simply distribution of the work, though that’s an attractive aspect
of it -- that you can read material and also hear sound online -- but
also for the promotion of books, magazines and reading series. The potential
of electronic mailing lists of people nationally who might want to hear
about a book that you like or that you've published is enormously useful.

Poetry tends toward the least line of resistance. That is to say, poetry
is very responsive to technology because in the economic (or anti-economic)
spectrum in which we work, one is always looking for ways to do it at
the least cost with the maximum exchange. In the 60’s and 70’s, mimeo,
photocopy and side-staple publications abounded. At the present time the
cheapest way to disseminate work is through electronic distribution and
poetry readings. A lot of the poetry on the web is better, certainly comparably
better, than work in the other arts because poets are putting up their
work somewhat more freely and comprehensively, or maybe you could say
with more sense of necessity. In a way, these sites are better than many
others because they’re not commercial. The sites are not about selling
something else. They’re about what they’re providing -- ends in themselves

Is that why now is the time for Close Listening?

The value of a book like this is that is doesn’t attempt to do anything
other than what a poem does: the impulse of these poet-scholars and scholar-critics
is to extend their thinking about what they do, their obsession in life
-- writing poetry and reading poetry. Their activity is not necessarily
involved with evaluation, promotion or even explanation; it's an activity
that's valued in and of itself and for the possibilities for exchange
that it provides.

I think that to the extent this book is a product of its time, it has
to do with a set of sometimes conflicting interests converging at this
moment. It also has to do with a willingness to accept a range of open-ended
exploration and investigation of poetics that are much less rigidly determined.
That's something that poets of the last 20 years have been very insistent
on – a more imaginative, open-ended style of creative essay writing, essay
writing that isn’t completely expository, that isn’t completely rationalized.

Why is the notion of a "resurgence" of poetry readings misguided?

Close Listening is, to a large extent, about poetry reading,
but also the visual performance of poetry. I think the current resurgence
of attention to poetry readings is great, but I would emphasize that poetry
performances go back further than written forms of poetry. So we’re not
talking about something new, but actually something very old. Nonetheless,
within critical and scholarly approaches to poetry, there had been an
idea that the written text was the gold standard of the poem -- it was
the full embodiment of the poem -- and that performances were secondary,
that they were illustrations.

The idea that poetry should be read out loud to be understood has never
entirely gone out of favor. Many people think that we are now in a "heyday"
for performance poetry, but that has partly to do with the kind of “fuzzy”
feature attention that poetry performances receive in newspapers. Generalized
articles about performance poetry usually don’t talk about individual
poets’ works or performances, but talk about a "social phenomenon."

You don’t have a discussion of a classical music concert by saying, “It
was interesting -- all these people got up with their instruments and
it’s a wonderful thing. They seem to gather every Friday night at Lincoln
Center to hear each other play, and the audience claps and seems very
enthusiastic. They’re playing things like violins . . .” Poetry readings
are treated not so much as an art activity or an aesthetic activity, but
primarily as a social activity.

What’s the major value of poetry performance, and how do readings
differ from other literary genres?

Poetry operates on a small scale. Poetry readings are intimate occasions;
they don't take place in stadiums. They don't have long runs. This intimacy
of scale is poetry’s great value in this society, because it offers possibilities
that are not available in mass-culture. Not that poetry's better than
mass culture, not that it replaces it, but that it's different, and that
the possibilities that it does offer are fundamental. To have a culture
operate at its best, or even to operate functionally, we can't do without
the possibilities poetry offers.

Poetry performance brings into concrete realization the dimension of
language itself: the languageness of language, the wordness of language,
the acoustic quality of language, that which exists only in and as language.
It's a dimension in which the language, the sound, and the particular
words in the particular order are not dispensable.

This indispensable quality, this feature of the medium of verbal language
itself, is something that's a fundamental value for a culture that tends
to treat these features as insignificant. This culture tends to think
of language and its forms as being disposable in some way -- as we seek
some truth in content, or some truth in message, or some truth in image,
or some truth in the meaning understood as being separable from
the way in which the meaning is created. Poetry puts us back in touch
with the ways in which meaning is generated and the musicality, the aesthetic
pleasure, of this medium. It considers language as having primary value
within this constrained context of the poem, of the poetry reading. I
wouldn't call it a "moral" value, but I would say there's a
political value to it, an ethical value.

How can poetry readings benefit the public audience?

A large part of the U.S. population reads. A very small part of those
readers read poetry. People who are unfamiliar with reading poetry at
all often are inclined to think that poetry is difficult, or incomprehensible,
or -- and I think this is the much more damaging assumption -- uninteresting.
Not because they might not be interested in a poem, but perhaps when they
look at the poem for the first time they have no information about how
they are to read the poem differently from how they read an issue of Time
Magazine or a popular novel.

People can easily go through their whole lives without any basic orientation
to reading poetry. Poetry readings are particularly good crash courses
in listening to poetry, because after being forced to sit through several
readings, all of a sudden a lot of the ideas we are discussing will come
to you on your own. But people reading the page often won't get beyond
the poem, they won't read through the whole thing, they won't see what
the shape is, or pick up on the value of the sound. Never having considered
that sound had any value at all, they won't be used to listening or to
reading out loud.

Unfortunately the way some of the promoters of poetry (around National
Poetry Month) want to address this issue of readers' unfamiliarity with
poetry is to promote and present poetry which is the most like the reading
experiences that readers usually get from reading large circulation magazines,
newspapers and popular novels. They present watered-down versions of the
popular materials that the readers are familiar with, but are less
interesting than those things. People may understand the poem, because
this “diminished capacity” poem doesn’t require any reading resources
that they are not using normally, but it likely to be less interesting
than the mass culture items with which it is trying to compete.

What's interesting about poetry is the ways in which it's not like
other forms of writing. I think in general, the whole conception of
"accessibility" is misguided. Very often what's being presented
is . . . something that's no longer interesting as poetry. It's the least
like poetry that it can be, and then it loses the readers that are actually
looking for that which is specific to poetry that isn't available elsewhere.

To offer anything less is valueless, because it merely looks like
poem. So then what's the point? Is there something wrong with TV and movies,
pop songs, non-fiction literature? The mass media has plenty of great
and engaging works to offer. It would be as if, in order to attract people
to read non-fiction literature, one presented it in light, free verse!
Why would you want to read it that way? Let people read nonfiction as
what it is, and poetry as what it is. They can't be conflated
quite in the way as those who would promote "accessibility"
as a kind of a ramp for the handicapped would want. Poetry is accessible,
it is auditable, it can be heard. It just requires throwing yourself into
it and becoming engaged with it as a complex, developed art form that's
quite sophisticated.

If you think of poetry as a call-and-response form, are you asking
people to help themselves develop a new kind of response?

Right, that's the whole idea of poetry in the late twentieth century.
Poetry is an activity that allows us to interrogate language and meaning.
What's interesting about it is that it's not popular culture, as such.
It's certainly not mass media as such. Many people interpret that to mean,
"it's better," or "it's elitist." But of course it's
popular culture and mass culture that tend to be elitist, because they
argue that only those things that get the biggest ratings are finally
worthwhile. The things that have lesser ratings or lesser interest scale
are valueless.

How does poetry performance differ from other literary genres?

People can and will get very excited about poetry at its most
complex, at its most difficult, in ways that it's mostunlike
other kinds of reading because you can get kinds of language and acoustic
experiences that you can't get in other modes of writing. It's those things
that ultimately attract the die-hard poetry audience, which is very intense
and very committed. That's really what poetry has to offer.

Without getting into too complex a way of explaining it, it has to do
with improvisation. The poetry reading presents so many different kinds
of significant experience that are often contradictory, that it makes
it harder to think of a poem as a fixed, static thing with a limited series
of features associated with it. The poetry reading introduces a number
of additional elements that also shift over time, and may not even be
consistent in the one performance.

In multiple performances of the poem, combined with the multiple dynamics
of each performance (intonation, volume, timbre, the social environment
in which the poem is being introduced, the non-verbal body language of
the performer), and combined with the text of the poem, there are more
elements than can actually be brought into a single rationalized description.
The poem in this multi-version sense exceeds any single scheme for understanding
what it means or what it is.

Would you explain your term, "animalady"?

The "animalady" of poetry is the sensorial, bodily dimension,
the way in which language is exchanged in terms of the acoustic. The actual
physical sound of the exchange is related to meaning. The meaning is not
something that exists in an idealized way that doesn't have to
do with the bodies that produce it and the bodies that hear it. This is
a limitation: so my "malady" has to do with our “condition,”
the limitation that we're inside. We can't get outside of it; though
we can idealize language to imagine it has meanings that exist outside
these physical boundaries. Of course, much contemporary philosophy will
also criticize the idea that there are transcendental meanings, but in
doing that, such philosophy often doesn't fully recognize the significance
of the media that we use for poetry: the visual representation of the
language and the acoustic sound of the language.

In your Introduction, you speak of "the poetry reading as a
public tuning." By this do you mean a sounding board for the continuous
evolution of a work?

Right. I meant that in one sense in a technical way. When you
think about a poem existing in a primary way in a reading, in a
performance, as opposed to on the page, then certain kinds of prosodic
and rhythmic possibilities, timbre and intonation, present themselves
which are not possible on the page. You can shift or keep constant how
fast you read, vary the quality of your voice. So one way in which the
work actually comes into tune, so that people can hear what these performative
patterns might be, is in the poetry reading. When people hear a poet read,
they become attuned to the kinds of sounds that that person is producing,
which may not be apparent in the printed text of the poem.

Performance affords the poet the opportunity to tune herself or himself
up, to hear how her or his work may sound, just as musicians don’t just
think about how something sounds, but try it out and often try it out
in public, where they can improvise, get tuned in and up to create the
sound that they want. So it’s a tuning both for the performer and for
the reader.

And I also mean "tuning" to emphasize the improvisatory quality
of poetry readings over and against the idea that a poem is a fixed, stable
thing. You write the poem, and it may seem to become this absolutely
immutable, static thing on a page. At a poetry performance nobody
imagines it that way. Everybody reads their poems a little bit differently
each time: the people who are present change the way you feel; or you
hear the poem in a different way depending on your mood, the people you’re
with, the physical space, and so on. So that mutability, and the improvisatory
quality that underlies poetry performance, could be thought of as a tuning.
Trying things out, exploring and in this way creating. So the process
of tuning becomes what the activity of poetry is. The activity of poetry
is not just producing these objects on a page, though that’s part of it
of course. But there is also this tuning in public before other people
and with other people, which is a very different kind of exchange than
print culture allows.

Are "success" and judgment irrelevant in a living process
that isn't goal oriented? What makes a "good" or "bad"
reading?

I think that there isn't a right way to read a poem, or a "better"
or "worse" way to read a poem, any more than there's a "better"
or "worse" way to write a poem. But the reading, the performance,
is an extension of what the poem is, and vice-versa (the writing
of the poem is an extension of what you're doing in the performance of
it). Different poems will demand different kinds of vocalization, and
in respect to the quality of poetry, very often poets dislike actors reading
poems, because they read them too well. It's hard to explain why that
is, but it's a common dislike.

What advice would you give poets who want to get involved in performance?

It's not only important to give poetry readings but also to organize
poetry readings, to recognize that organizing a poetry reading series
is as important as editing a magazine. Or for that matter, to review poetry
readings as well as poetry books. Or review the way in which a person
reads their work in the context of also reviewing a publication of their
work. Don't leave out the performance dimension when you imagine what
the work of a poet is in those contexts of criticism.

So, yes, it’s important to take every opportunity you can to read your
work out loud, to do performances of your work, not just once in a blue
moon, but as a frequent part of your work as a poet. Just as you might
seek to publish poems in a number of magazines, or publish many books,
it's also good to have many chances to read.

Then, take those readings that you do as being as significant as the
publication of the work in print media. That would mean, for example,
rehearsing your work. Making a tape of your reading and listening back
to it and possibly "scoring" the page with different ideas you
have as you listen to it. You could be faster here, slower there, leave
a pause here.

Also, listen to the tape of your reading in different situations. Not
just where that's the only thing going on, but while you're washing the
dishes or walking in the street, or exercising, or on the subway or a
bus, so that you don't focus just on the poem from beginning to
end, but hear it more as ambient sound. Then, so far as you can focus
on the reading as ambient sound, pick up on dimensions of the performance
that you wouldn't get if you were just focused on the main message of
the poem.

So you think it's important to approach this as a continuous process
rather than allowing yourself to get into a single habit of reading?

Right. Continue to rethink for each reading the way in which you read,
and not to assume that the way you read once should be repeated. Try out
different styles, different rhythms and so on, and don't assume that you
automatically know how to read every kind of poem. Try out performance
dynamics that might seem to be contrary to what the poem would lend itself
to, to try to provide some tension or contrast. There's no direct system
for reading a poem that was written on the page. In a performance, you're
adding things. So you have to come to the same kinds of decisions that
you make in writing the poem itself. You may think that you don't need
to make those decisions because you're relying on certain habitual patterns
of how people read or how things should be read. But you should try out
several ways. Don't go with the first thing or what seems the most obvious
to you.

Then, keep re-rehearsing and rethinking what the performance is and what
the possibilities for your work are through your life as a poet. By performance,
I don't mean a highly theatrical, loud, demonstrative reading at all.
I think one of the things you realize when you listen to a tape and attend
closely to how you read is that often the "chamber music" side
of poetry is more intensely appealing than anything else. Often, being
low-key has great value. You can read in a very introverted way and still
have that work, if you intend it to be introverted. If your quietness
is the result of nervousness, and never thinking it through, it doesn’t
come off that well. But if it's actually an intense thing that you're
articulating -- that has to do with the music of the work -- that can
be just right.

When people come to poetry readings, they're not expecting to be at rock
and roll concerts and can be put off by outrageous, over-the-top readings.
So by "performance," I don't mean revving up. Often you can
be more subtle.

Can this also persuade an audience to attend more to the language?

Yes, it may allow the audience to attend. Often poetry readings
are a kind of sensory deprivation for people who are used to more theatrical
kinds of performances. There's a sense of poetry reading as "poor
theater." But a poor theater, low-tech performance is no less fully
realized as a performance than a high-tech, multimedia performance. It's
not something that is done because you can't do anything else; it's something
that can be done because this is the sound you want to hear.

The more, of course, you rehearse and read, the more comfortable you
are in the space of the poetry reading, the more you are able to play
around, to improvise, and to understand that the reading's its own kind
of space. When you're doing a poetry reading you can have almost the experience
of being at home writing in a notebook. You're creating the sound as you
go along. If you're not too self-conscious about the script, you can’t
focus on the actual work of producing the sound.

Also, try listening to other people reading. Pay attention to the different
styles of readings. Listen to tapes of historical poetry readings and
poetry readings that you would not be able to attend locally. Consider
the possibilities and become immersed in the performance of poetry as
much as you are in the reading of poetry on the page.